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" I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor. "
Matthew Desmond
How
Role
Poor
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" I love Milwaukee, the rust belt. It's a very special part of America that's full of promise but also full of pain, where poverty is acute. "
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" I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart. "
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" A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country. "
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" All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes. "
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" You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one. "
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" Most poor families are living completely unassisted in a private rental market, devoting most of their income to housing. When you meet people who are spending 70, 80 percent of their income on rent, eviction becomes much more of an inevitability than the result of personal irresponsibility. "
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" You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent. "
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" Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have. "
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" It's true that eviction affects the young and the old, the sick and the able-bodied. It affects white folks and black folks and Hispanic folks and immigrants. If you spend time in housing court, you see a really diverse array of folks there. "
Matthew Desmond
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" When you ask people why they were evicted, the big reason is nonpayment of rent. They can't afford to keep a roof over their heads. Utilities are a big part of the story too, while the third leg on the table is the lack of government help with housing. "
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" Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. "
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Thought
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" Housing is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, it all falls apart. "
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Falls
Housing
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" Without the ability to plant roots and invest in your community or your school - because you're paying 60, 70, 80 percent of your income to rent - and eviction becomes something of an inevitability to you, it denies you certain freedoms. "
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" These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. "
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Carry
Day
" I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn't only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, 'Shoot, eviction does that.' "
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Me
Looking
Like
" Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street. "
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" Even growing up the way I did, I was shocked by the level of poverty I saw as a college student. I thought the best way to understand it was to get close to it on the ground level. "
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" Many times when we are talking about displacement, we talk about it within the frame of gentrification, which focuses on transitioning neighborhoods. But man, every city I've looked at, Milwaukee included, most evictions are right there, smack dab in ungentrifying, poor, segregated communities. "
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" Eviction causes loss. You lose not only your home but also your possessions, which are thrown onto the curb or taken by movers, and often you can't keep up payments. "
Matthew Desmond
Lose
Loss
Only
" You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff. "
Matthew Desmond
Lose
Home
School
" The poor don't want some small life. They don't want to game the system. They want to contribute, and they want to thrive. But poverty reduces people born for better things. "
Matthew Desmond
Game
Small
Poverty
" I saw people get fired after their eviction. But when I found that if you get evicted, your chances of losing your job increase by 20 percent, that's when it really hit home for me. "
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Home
Losing
Me
" Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11% reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31% of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44.7%. "
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Family
" This country has so much wealth and so much poverty, and that seemed wrong to me. 'Evicted' was my Ph.D. dissertation. "
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" When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level. "
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Level
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" You meet folks who are funny and really smart and persistent and loving that are confronting this thing we call poverty, which is just a shorthand for this way of life that holds you underwater. And you just wonder what our country would be if we allowed these people to flourish and reach their full potential. "
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" I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty. "
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Journalism
Tradition
" Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial. "
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Housing
" This was what a lot of us, mainly young men, did in the summers in northern Arizona. This is how I put myself through college. I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school. "
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Myself
" If you just catalog the effects eviction has on people's live and neighborhoods, it's pretty troubling. "
Matthew Desmond
Just
Catalog
You